Abstract
Peter Euben’s California license plate read “KALON,” Greek for “the beautiful.” It was a choice that captured much about Euben. On the one hand, there was his mocking self-parody, for while Euben was many things, as a slightly balding, slightly rotund middle-aged man of middling height he would never have claimed the classic beauty of the Greek sculptures adorning the acropolis. But a license plate emblazoned with KALON also captured Euben’s enchantment with the ancient Greek world whose authors elegantly offered their audiences and readers tragic insights into human potential and the limits of human knowledge that Euben worked to communicate to his students and to the readers of his books and articles. And the word captured a goal toward which we might aim through our everyday interactions as democratic citizens striving together for some sort of collective knowledge to guide us.
J. Peter Euben died May 28, 2018, at the age of 78, leaving his daughters Donna and Roxanne and his granddaughters Lauren, Jenna, and Asha. He was born on July 18, 1939, in Calicoon, NY, and attended Forest Hills High School in Queens, NY, and Swarthmore College where he majored in philosophy and politics. After spending time at Oxford and at the London School of Economics, he moved to Berkeley, initially intending to study Chinese politics. He received his PhD in 1968 in Political Science from Berkeley. There, during the tumultuous 1960s, he studied with the founders of what has come to be known as the “Berkeley School of Political Theory”: Hanna Pitkin, John Schaar, and Sheldon Wolin. Euben, though, was no mere acolyte of his renowned mentors; rather, he drew from them the inspiration to make political theory a practice that entailed engaged citizenship, democratic commitments, the art of teaching, and scholarship that was sensitive to the deepest human longings for connections and the capacity to live well in a world of constant challenges.
Though Euben’s publications ranged broadly from reflections on the nature of moral education to Arendt to post-modernism to cosmopolitanism, his most profound commitment was to the challenges posed in the works that survived from ancient Greece, notably introducing the ancient tragedies and comedies (often matched with contemporary novels) into a political theory world that had largely focused on Plato and Aristotle. Euben’s books taught us to learn about politics and, more importantly, the contingent nature of our lives and thoughts through literature, especially tragedies, and to read philosophy as literature, not as the articulation of truths, but as the discovery of the uncertainty of any claims to truth. Indeed, his works were filled with warnings against the tyranny of certainty. Euben’s books and articles were never dry scholarly works. The issues they raised were deeply personal ones, whether he was writing about loss in Platonic Noise or education in Corrupting Youth.
Euben was a legendary teacher at UC Santa Cruz for 34 years where famously he taught a class of hundreds about “Political Freedom.” Moving to Duke in 2002 he became the Kenan Distinguished Faculty Fellow in Ethics and expanded his pedagogical touch to a host of dedicated graduate students. At both institutions, he engaged his students in reading political theory and literary works, both ancient and modern, as resources from which they might develop a radical perspective on the present. As he said in his “final lecture” to students at Santa Cruz, his goal was to bring philosophy into the streets. He argued that education was not for who we are in the present, but for who we might become. Euben was committed to enabling his students to see that the present was not to play tyrant over the future.
The stories of Euben’s intellectual and personal generosity to students, to colleagues, to students who became colleagues are legion. All can recall those moments when Euben asked just the right question, pushed in just the right direction, that suddenly would transform an inchoate idea into an insight that now had a significance only imagined but not actualized before. There was an intensity in Euben’s gaze as he interrogated his interlocutors, but it was an intensity that was always softened by the gentleness and inquisitiveness with which he posed the questions and by the knowledge that that intensity came from a serious concern for the individual with whom he was speaking and for the ideas they were exploring.
Perhaps Euben’s most personal book was Platonic Noise, a profound meditation on loss and grief, on the loss that reveals how we as humans must eschew the commitment to, indeed the arrogance of, certainty, a theme that runs through all his works. As the epigraph for this book, Euben quoted Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus. The passage begins the play, as the blind Oedipus asks Antigone to lead him to a place near the precincts of the gods where he may sit and “find out where we are; for we have come / as strangers, and must learn from the citizens.” Euben’s life entailed just that learning from citizens, from interrogating others whether that be in the form of personal one-on-one conversations or in the classroom settings or in dialogue with the great (and maybe sometimes not so great like the Simpsons) literary works of the past and the present.
The epigraph from the Oedipus at Colonus prefaces the play that enacts Oedipus’s death, or more precisely his disappearance from the land of the living. For Oedipus’s daughters, the grief displayed in the play is profound, but the ending of the play is optimistic; Oedipus’s death at Colonus ensures that the future Athens will be “free from pain.” Death entails loss, but Euben’s books written in his distinctive style will continue to admonish us against pretensions of certainty and provoke us out of complacency.